The use of secure communication of information provided by encryption techniques is desirable in wireless communication devices, such as pagers, cellular telephones, etc. In these environments, there is a constant struggle to minimize the amount of information transmitted to control costs and profitability of systems. When the data to be transmitted is encrypted, it is still desirable to minimize the overall amount of data actually transmitted.
Elliptic curve (EC) cryptography has become particularly useful in the field of wireless communication because it is more efficient both in terms of bandwidth and computation time than other industry public key encryption standards, such as RSA. It is desirable to provide a circuit and method for exploiting certain properties of EC cryptography to facilitate the use of this technology in wireless communication devices.